


Sick Day

by softsylvie



Category: Villainous (Cartoon)
Genre: CW: for references to drug abuse, i guess this could be silkbag if you squint?, idfk i don't usually write shippy stuff so, what began as a sick/care fic turned into other things lalala, zug is the angry bart simpson of this family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-09
Updated: 2018-08-09
Packaged: 2019-06-24 04:33:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15622623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/softsylvie/pseuds/softsylvie
Summary: Doctor Zug doesn't usually take sick days.  When he has to, guess who has to make him.  Just guess.





	Sick Day

For how much he hated his job, and for how vocal he was about hating his job, it might have surprised people to learn that Zug didn’t call in sick.  Not for any reason, not until he was worn to his bones and halfway to dead, slouched like a fish-eyed corpse over his worktable.  It wasn’t for love of the job as much as it was for simple resolve.  Sickness was for weak little bastards who couldn’t handle it.  Any villain that surrendered to inconvenience wasn’t worth his weight in salt, and it usually found him torn apart at the hands of his nemesis. 

This philosophy was a viciously ingrained thing, nearly palpable as a nail hammered square into every villain’s head.

So when he picked up the cough and bright scratch in his throat, Zug kept working.

A day later when he started to sneeze, Zug kept working.

When the headache swooped in, rolling like a thunderhead with fresh lightning behind his goggles, Zug snapped at 624 (to take the edge off) and pressed on with his blueprints.  Fuck Head, or White Hat as he was generally known, wanted the blueprints for some fuck-all device or other that combatted mind control radio waves.

Total crock of shit, but Zug worked despite that, because it was either this or prison.  And that particular Sing Sing in the beating heart of the multiverse was a hard one, even for him.

All that was left to figure out was… something, an ever elusive _something_ about the transistors.  The dish’s shape and range had been decided by their budget.  If White had a problem with it, to hell with it, he could hand him more money.

“Doctor Zug, dear!  How are we faring?”

Great.

As if on cue, the soft idiot himself came waltzing right into his lab.  Totally out of place among the shadows of menacing arrays, the shoaled drums of toxic waste, his suit going up like white neon in the dim green lighting.  But he was there.  He was there and smiling like a ninny as if he was welcome, as always. 

Zug grunted.  “About as great as I was when you asked _two hours_ ago,” he snarled, wincing at the dry and tight ache in his throat.  He cleared it for good measure.  “How many times do I have to _say it?_ I’d need to decide on a range based off the budget _you_ hocked off on me!”

White Hat frowned.  “If you do need more funding allocated to the project, my dear, you only needed to ask…”  He trailed off suspiciously.

The scientist couldn’t say he liked that.  In his prior line of work, a thought left unfinished was usually repurposed as a threat.  “What?” Zug finally asked.  “What do you want?  What do you need?  If you’re gonna ask me to build it from junk material, y’know what?  I’m fine with it.  Not like _I_ give a shit.”

“Language, Zug.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Doctor?”

“ _What?_ ”  Harried to the edge, Zug glared as furiously at the entity as he could manage. 

White Hat was staring at him with a disgustingly vivid tenderness.  Through the monocle, Zug could feel the full brunt of it.  “Doctor Zug,” he said quietly.  “May I ask you something?”

“If it’s not ‘can I give you a fifty percent raise because you’re just that damn good looking’, then no, fuck you.”

“I’m going to let that slide for the time being, dear,” White Hat mumbled.  He stepped in closer, bending a little at the waist.  Zug instinctively backpedaled.  “As futile a question as this might be, I do have to ask, are you feeling all right?”

“Fine,” Zug lied.  “Fine as I _can_ be in this dump.”

“You’re not being honest with me right now, are you?”

“I _said_ I’m fine,” Zug snapped with all the belligerence his throat allowed.  Which, for the record, wasn’t much before his voice threatened to crack on him.  “Geeze, take a hint, already!”

“Oh, I think I’ve taken quite a few hints.”  White Hat straightened back up, his mouth twisted in a disapproving frown.  “Zug.  You do know the company policy on sick days, don’t you?”

Zug whipped back to his worktable, making a show of looking over his schematics.  “I’m sorry, are you still talking?  Are we having this conversation?”

“I believe so, yes.  Do I need to review the policy with you?”

“Sure, let’s make a sing-along of it.  Page seventy-four, paragraph two, subsection eight: fuck off and let me work.”

His impudence was rewarded by the floor liquefying beneath his feet.  Zug felt it swallow him in squelching gulps like a bog of quicksand, stomach plunging as he fell screaming through one of White Hat’s portals.  He fell briefly through nothingness, shouting some colorful obscenities, only to flip onto his back on the groaning springs in his mattress.  Zug recognized his room quickly enough as it swam into view. 

White Hat shimmied out of the shadows, materializing next to his bed as perfectly composed as ever.  “I believe,” he intoned, “that the policy we agreed to consisted of one day of _required_ bedrest, Doctor.”

Zug shot up, fully intent to bark at White Hat about where he could shove his _policy._ His throat caught up with him and left him doubled over coughing for his trouble, coughing so hard that stars wheeled fecklessly across his vision.

“There, you see?” White Hat sighed, shaking his head.  He reached out to lay a gentle hand across Zug’s back.  “This is what happens when you don’t _rest,_ dear.  This is what happens when you keep sneaking back to your lab, trying to pull those all-nighters instead of getting the sleep you need.”

 _Yeah, and maybe if you’d piss off, I’d get something done!_ The argument was there, but it lied as impossibly out of reach as his next breath as he started hawking up fluid.  It had gotten so much worse over the past two days; every gasp of air he took rattled. 

“Keep coughing, get it out of your chest,” White Hat said, frowning.  His hand patted lightly between Zug’s shoulder blades.  “You don’t want to infect your lungs.”

“Get off…!”  Zug whipped around to slap his employer’s hand away.  He drew a damp wheeze, clutching at his head that now hammered like it had taken a well-pitched softball.  “Just _stop it,_ you idiot!  Christ, like you know anything about human anatomy anyway!”

A twinge of hurt flashed in White Hat’s eyes, but it twinkled out fast like a lone ember.  He managed a small smile, as if he wouldn’t dare venture much else.  “All right, I’ll let you remain the expert on that venue, Zug.  But I don’t think you’ve much of a case for your health, anymore.  Do you?”

It always had to be like this, didn’t it?  The smug asshole held all the strings, called all the shots, ensuring that Zug would _never_ forget who he had to thank for all that _kindness._ Zug was familiar enough with _kindness_ to know that it had a price, so it could be bought, sold, and set with conditions just like everything else.  In this case, walking the lines for the price of a prison sentence.

_Do as I say, or it’s off to backdoor parole.  Now aren’t I so goddamn **benevolent?** Look at the good I’ve done here, where’s my cookie?_

Honestly, that’s what made Zug so _sick_ about all the sterility of good deeds and heroics.  Beneath the veneer, between the golden stitches of all that moral fabric, you’d likely find a sanctimonious prick who got off on how much better he was than the other no-names around him.  Glory and cheering crowds, that was about what it came to.  White Hat couldn’t be much different from any other hero.  They were a dime a dozen, denying the core of nature like everyone they protected.  At least in evil, you had a fundamental honesty.   

“What does it matter, as long as the work gets done?” Zug snapped.  He mounted his feet, heart set on getting back to the lab downstairs.  “Screw it, I’m done with this.  Get out of my way.  I’m going back to work.”

He threw open the door, only to be met with what looked like a shimmering wall of light the color of dusty parchment.  It wavered with translucent rings like a rippled pond, shifting with the low thrum of something large moving beneath its surface. 

Zug turned, his look indignant.  “Really?”

White Hat’s own answering look was stern.  “Really.  Now if you’re ready to get into bed, I’ll kindly let our patrons know that their order is going to be a tad delayed.”

“I’m sure all those mind control victims will understand perfectly,” Zug said, before he proceeded to hack out what felt like half a lung.

“You know as well as I do that it wasn’t a code red order, so that’s not even relevant.”

Goddamnit, it wasn’t.

Zug wasn’t about to draw any weapons for his part, either.  He was dishonorable by all counts, a cutthroat to his core, but he certainly wasn’t stupid.  He flung himself on his mattress, grumbling things better left unrepeated in the polite company of children and grandmothers alike.  “There.  Happy?”

“Well, I can’t say I’m happy to see you unwell,” White Hat replied.  “But I’m pleased for the time being, now that you’re not being so stubborn.”

“Bite me.”

“Mmhm.”  White Hat snapped his fingers, and Zug’s blankets slid over him of their own accord, the dark crosshatches of blue and black fabric shining gold as if they were covering a lantern.  “Try to get a little rest now, my dear.  I’ll bring up your dinner later.”

Zug lost his reply in another coughing fit.  By the time he regained himself, White Hat had already gone.  “Fucking shit,” he muttered.  “Fucking shit and a half.”  He wrenched the blanket around his shoulder as he turned, hating everything within a good ten mile radius, including the sleep that he could feel looming on the other side of the next few minutes.  Sleep wasn’t something Zug indulged in, despite frantically needing it.  He had his reasons. 

Reasons that had fallen behind him in the courts of the Nexus Bastion, thank you very much. 

He slept anyway, and thankfully without dreams.

 

*** 

 

Zug woke up stranded somewhere cold, damp.  Damp as rain itself down to his bones.  Chilled.  Freezing, every joint aching, awake and snarling.  God, he hadn’t woken like this in a long time.  Sometimes, in his multidimensional travels, he’d scored some pretty good shit that had him tripping, gacked, rolling and wired on the odd day.  Iridescent powders, glowing plants unheard of on Earth, pills etched with odd runes, the works that _every_ vagabond between the worlds tried at _some_ point, especially when they dealt in the trade for favors or a little extra cash.  And sometimes he’d woken a few hours later feeling like he’d eaten a five course meal of wet concrete. 

This was _something_ similar, a different paw of the same animal, he supposed.  He just couldn’t figure out who the hell had whacked him with a sledgehammer while he was sleeping, or how the hell they’d gotten out of his room alive.

He groaned, turning a head that felt like it weighed fifty pounds.

“Easy, dear.”  A gentle hand laid a cool washcloth over his forehead…

His _forehead._

The bag was _missing._

“N-no, where…!”  Zug’s fingers fled to a bagless face, dancing over scarred flesh.  “No, what the fuck, what the _fuck_ …!” 

“Shhh.  You were sweating right through it.”  White Hat shimmered into view on the edge of his mattress, once Zug was able to blink past the damp cold that was eating him alive, chewing him up, apt to spit him out.  His employer was watching him with concern.  A fold-up tray with a bowl of soup perched on top of it sat on his nightstand.  “Looks like we got you to bed just in time.  Here, if you can, try to drink a little water.”

“You _took_ the bag, you fucker…!” Zug wheezed, wanting to strangle him.  “You took it while I was _sleeping,_ the fuck is _wrong_ with you…!” 

“Shhh.  Here, now.  Just the fever talking, I’ll assume.” 

Zug sputtered out what remained of his hate.  White Hat may have been right about that, to an extent, but goddamnit he’d taken the _bag_ and he’d done it while he was _sleeping._ Heroes weren’t supposed to _violate_ things like that, were they?

White Hat held a water bottle to his mouth, tipping it ever slightly.  Not a modicum of judgment hung in those eyes.  No pity.  No condescension.

Zug welcomed the water into his dry, tightened throat.    

“Easy,” White Hat soothed.  “Not too fast, now.  You don’t want to just cough it back up.”

“What time is it?”

“About half past one in the morning.  You slept for quite a while, but you very clearly needed it and I didn’t want to wake you.”

Zug forced himself up on his elbows, panting by the time he’d managed to sit completely upright.  The room pulsed, in and out of focus like a painting left out in the rain.  Stripped and frozen under fevered skin, he couldn’t even hope to keep up his front.  “Feel like crap,” he mumbled, half expecting to not be heard.

White Hat nodded.  “I can imagine,” he said gently.  “Are you hungry?”

“I can feed myself.”

“Of course.”

They sat this way a while, Zug eating freshly reheated soup as White Hat kept mindful watch.  He surprised himself by emptying the bowl and downing the rest of the water.  The first couple spoonfuls had woken his stomach, found it snarling in fresh hunger.  White Hat watched, but didn’t say a single word.  Zug couldn’t be sure whether to be thankful or not.

“Feel a little better?” White Hat asked, a minute or so after he’d finished.

Zug shrugged.  “Might feel better if someone buried me alive.”

White Hat only chuckled, shaking his head.  “I suppose it’s a good sign that you’ve recovered enough of your strength to be sarcastic,” he said, gathering the empty bowl.  “There’s some aspirin on the tray, too.  I’d recommend you take that and get back to sleep, dear.”

“Yeah, yeah.”  Zug’s hand shot out for the tiny white pills sitting on his tray.  “Could have gotten it myself, you know.  Didn’t have to pull all of _this_ shit.”

“I beg your pardon?”  White Hat turned, glancing at him in bare confusion.  “Pull all of this, you said?”

“Yeah.  Pull.  As in, pull my leg, pull a stunt, a shuck.  You don’t have to be so goddamn _nice_ to me, of all people,” Zug said evenly.  He downed the pills without a drop of water.  “We know the score.  You’re boss.  I’m not.  You’re the big, heroic good guy, I’m just the piece of shit you scooped out of the gutter.  I get it, you get it.”  Yes, it was definitely the fever talking.  Yes, it had loosened quite a few bolts that Zug otherwise kept nice and tight, but feeling strangely floaty as he straddled the line between freezing to death and sweating bullets, he found that he didn’t care. 

Even stranger, White Hat wasn’t folding that baffled expression of his.  He didn’t smirk at him, the way the Judge and the Assessor had at the Nexus Bastion as they read off his sins like a Christmas list.  He didn’t toss aside that swollen pretense to become the same egotistical, sanctimonious shithead that every hero did when they found out what he was. 

He didn’t look amused in any way, shape, or form.  Just… sincerely flummoxed. 

“I don’t know where you got the idea that you’re _garbage,_ Zug,” White Hat said, when he apparently found his voice.  Zug almost chuckled.  Garbage wasn’t what he’d said, but sure, roll with it.  “But I’ve _never_ thought that way about you.  Not once.  You’re certainly troubled by something, anchored by something, or maybe a few somethings, that much is obvious.  But I won’t be the one to force it out of you.” 

“Oh don’t even pull some sort of armchair psychiatrist shit,” Zug spat.  “I took a couple psych classes, too, doesn’t make me a goddamn shrink.”

“Am I wrong, though?”

No, he wasn’t.  And no, Zug didn’t have it within him to bother trying to bury it, so he veered off track from the shallow grave where it lied twitching.  “That’s my problem with you _heroes,_ ” he sneered.  “You think you know _everything._ ”

White Hat laughed quietly.  “A few of them _do_ have a bit of an ego, I can grant you that,” he said.  “They might be in it for the wrong reasons, I’ll grant you that, too.  But we aren’t talking about them.”

_Fuck._

“You’re free to think however you want, dear,” White Hat continued, sensing correctly that Zug had no answer proper for that.  “I’m not out to convince you of anything.  But I don’t see you as _garbage_ or anything less than a brilliant scientist and engineer.  I simply wanted you to know that.”

Now this, Zug was prepared for.  “Don’t go sucking up,” he grumbled.  “Just let me get back to sleep.”

It didn’t wipe that stupid, soft fucking smile off White Hat’s face.  “Of course, Doctor.”  He stood, hands folded neatly behind his back.  “Good night, and pleasant dreams.”

Zug fell back on his pillow as his boss took his cue.

He let sleep take him in greedy hands, not even bothering with that niggling little notion that maybe White Hat had _meant_ every word he’d said. 

It had almost been the first time that someone actually fooled him.

**Author's Note:**

> once again, thanks for reading! any attention/concrit is appreciated!
> 
> Until next time, m'loves!


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